Video Games, Opinions, Thoughts, & Tomfoolery

This whole issue has passed and at first I refrained from commenting on it, but I think it’s still worth commenting on. Last week, Cheap Ass Gamer ran a contest within their community to see who could make up the best and most believable rumor. A few bloggers, including Kotaku’s Brian Crecente, picked up one of the rumors and ran with it. I’m not going to name the rumor, because it doesn’t really deserve any more attention, but the fallout of these blogs running stories based on the competition merits a little discussion. Once the Internet’s finest detectives flushed out that the source for the rumor was indeed CAG’s little contest, Brian was backed into a corner and forced to admit that he posted an unconfirmed bit of (fake) news. Of course, rather than showing some good humor and admitting his mistake, Brian did what he always does; he lashed out and decided to push the blame back into CAG’s hands. Below is what Brian said when he updated his original rumor post:

UPDATE: It appears that this rumor story could be CAG throwing their credibility out the window as part of a contest. Kotaku”s decision to run rumors is always based on the credibility of the site and the information contained within it. In the past CAG has proven to be a reliable site, having broken a number of stories through apt reporting. It appears that may no longer be the case.

Well, jeez, Brian…can you really blame this on CheapyD and CAG? Is that really fair? You failed to fact check, you failed to follow up on a lead, and you made the decision to run with a rumor that had no credibility in the first place. All you had to do was a little bit of simple digging and you could have easily found out it was all part of a fun community contest put on by CAG. Don’t blame CheapyD and Wombat for trying to have some fun with their readers and podcast listeners. Your arrogance in these sort of matters is what turned me off of Kotaku years ago and is the same reason I don’t visit the site today. It’s ok to be wrong, but it’s not ok to throw a site under the bus simply because you failed to do a simple thing like fact checking before hitting the post button. And no, CAG wasn’t throwing their credibility out of the window by running the contest, you were when you ran with the rumor in a sad attempt to beat your competition to the scoop. Bravo, Brian, bravo. Here’s what your update is really saying to me:

UPDATE: It appears that this rumor story could be me throwing my credibility out the window as part of a premature reaction. Kotaku”s decision to run rumors is always based on the ridiculous need to get lots of hits to drive up our click count to appease our traffic-hungry superiors. In the past CAG has proven to be a reliable site, having broken a number of stories through apt reporting which we’ve hastily grabbed and slapped on our front page. It appears that we may either need to start fact checking like most reputable sites and blogs or risk continuing to look like total clowns and amatuers.

For the record, Joystiq, Kotaku’s biggest competitor, refrained from posting the rumor that they were very much well-aware of. Joystiq and CAG good. Kotaku bad.

26 Comments

Brian Cresente has all the credibility of a rock. Kotaku started to REALLY come arpart with the advent of “Banhammer Mondays”. A wonderful day, when little wars could be waged to have folks banned. Between Cresente’s deungeon master sized ego, and Ashcraft’s constant droning about his fucking wife and kid, and the fanboys licking their bags like it was all mana from heaven, I’d had enough. I sent Cresente a very mature and constructive message on how a long time reader had seen things change to the point that he was now leaving on my way out the door. The reply. “Who asked you asshole? Go fuck yourself. Get out.” Lovely, and VERY professional I might add. Well played. I also discovered that Brian’s top shelf reply came with the amazing addition of a total IP ban. Not just to Kotaku, oh no, that wouldn’t have been juvenile enough. It had to be across all Gawker sites. Cresente is the John Romero of blogging, except that he’s NEVER been cool. BTW Bri, it’s 2008 buddy, lose the mullet.

kotaku’s run by a bunch of douchebags. it’s a “privilege” to post there, and as they love to remind you, they’ll take it away at the drop of a hat. i’ve never signed up/commented there and i never will. the whole site’s just a sponsor marketing platform.

Kotaku is a piece of shit site that I’ve always hated. 90% of their traffic doesn’t even like video games. It’s like the pop-eater of game blogs. CAG is a much better site. And yes Brain, shave that ugly fuckin mullet of yours you piece of shit.

Granted, this is just a small sampling of people from nearly six years ago, but not only does the disparity between what’s allowable offline and on still pervade people’s perceptions today, but that anyone at any time could write shit like this off by playing the “It’s just a blog…” card in the first place depresses the shit out of me.

Whether or not Kotaku is a blog, they owe it to their readers to demonstrate some degree of journalistic integrity. The assholes put ads up on their site, and if they essentially expect to be paid for the content they post there, then we readers deserve the comfort of knowing that said content is substantially more credible than the shit that gets posted by fanboys to your average videogame enthusiast forum. Shit like this just undermines the site’s value, and sadly, that Kotaku can’t understand that is owed to the fact that so few of us hold sites like theirs to a better standard. Sadly, the folks in that link who argue that this is okay aren’t the minority, and until we gamers start demanding better as a collective, this is all we’re going to get.

The sad thing is that in the six years or so since this happened, Kotaku hasn’t improved at all. In fact they’ve actually managed to become worse in the years since. They frequently post ridiculous op-eds, many of which are so tangentially related to gaming that you have to wonder if the folks who write for the site are even trying anymore. They frequently post articles that marginalize and objectify women, seemingly based on two assumptions; the first being that females don’t play videogames and so wouldn’t read the sexist articles they post, and the second being that your average gamer is such an undersexed freak that they’ll ignore the lack of quality in Kotaku’s posts as long as they utter the word breast at least once in the body of the article. They post articles that are all of one sentence long, and will post press-releases wholesale, promising follow-ups that essentially just reiterate what the press-release said whenever they get around to posting them. They continue to post unsubstantiated rumors without bothering to research them, and quite oddly, their unwillingness to research also includes checking to see if they’ve previously posted an article about something themselves before posting another one. Ashcraft still uses the site as a platform for his obsession with Japan, the editors are still ban-crazy, and all-around the site is just one of the worst places on the internet for fans of the hobby to go to get their news. The sooner the site dive-bombs, the better off we’ll all be.

Not only does Kotaku suck but so do their users. Most of them troll the comment sections just like users on IGN do. Speaking of Kotaku again and it seems that they don’t even know what they are talking about when it comes to games. One recent Kotaku article stated that the action-RPG Dragon’s Dogma only had three classes when in reality, it actually has NINE and this was confirmed months ago.

If Kotaku couldn’t get that righ, then that shows that they don’t check their sources.

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